Re: grammar triviality with '&&'

[Lawrence Velázquez <vq@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mar 6, 2015, at 11:10 AM, Ray Andrews <rayandrews@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> In C this sort of obscurity not only doesn't exist, it couldn't exist,
> you can wrap code anyway you want (string printing excepted).

Did you forget that every C syntactic construct has an explicit
terminating symbol (semicolon, brace, parenthesis, quotation mark,
etc.)? It's easy to wrap lines willy-nilly when you ignore newlines by
design. (Oops, except in preprocessor directives.)

This newlines-matter-except-when-they-don't game has been tried in other
languages, and this is the kind of thing that can happen when you're
sloppy about it:

http://jamesallardice.com/understanding-automatic-semi-colon-insertion-in-javascript/

> But shells are written in C

Irrelevant.

> yet the decision was made to make things so convoluted that no one
> fully understands them.

These "convoluted" bits would appear much less so if you did not insist
on forcing your understanding of other tools onto this one.

vq